Wherever we have pitched these solutions, the customer is very satisfied with their capability and the security, which Sangfor takes care of.
Sangfor has recently increased their prices, which is not a good thing. Six months back, the price was very competitive for other principals, but they have increased it now, which is disappointing.
It's almost been five years since I started working with this solution.
NGAF is a very stable product. We never experience any complaint from customers that it is down due to the power supply or other hardware components. Normally, we don't get many complaints about Sangfor appliances or products.
Our clients are a mix of small, medium, and enterprise clients. In Pakistan, if a customer has 500 plus users or an endpoint, we consider it medium. However, we consider more than 1,000 users as a large enterprise.
Technical support is very good. It's instant. As a gold partner, we normally bring up the case with Sangfor whenever we receive a call. In parallel, our engineer goes to the customer to see the problem and takes the backend support from Sangfor. If a replacement is required, which is very rare, we normally get it within the time frame in the SLA.
The initial setup is not difficult. When it comes to the customer policies, we have to customize them, but that's not a big thing. It is almost the same with other firewalls.
The time taken to deploy the solution depends on whether the customer installs the base or what they want to secure.
Sangfor has recently increased their prices, which is not a good thing. Six months back, the price was very competitive when it came to other principals, but they have increased the price now which is a bit disappointing.
Sangfor is a security company, and whenever we pitch their complete solution to security, the customer normally takes it case by case. First, they normally get the firewalls, then the rest of the solution's offerings to get 360-degree security for their organization.
Sangfor is always coming up with something new to add value to their products. In their Internet access gateway, they are introducing a new feature called data leak prevention and stuff like that. When it comes to security, people are very touchy, especially customers. They want good security parameters when it comes to security. If any principal comes up with new technologies and offerings within the same bundle, customers see that it adds value.
My clients wanted to have an appliance or a virtual firewall on-premises. The rest of the collaboration comes with Neural-X, which needs the Internet so that customers can get information about new threats and malicious viruses so that it can get updated on the fly.
Regarding the sizing, we keep providing the growth factor for the customer. For example, if the customer has 1,000 users, we oversize it, considering a growth factor of 10% to 15% per year. If the customer grows, they won't have to rip and replace their appliances. They have the provision to have peace of mind for three to five years.
The Pakistani market is tricky, where people are very conscious of prices. You need to add value by having good pricing and technical capabilities. Rating Sangfor NGAF technically and financially, I rate it a nine out of ten. Rating it financially, it was a ten out of ten six months back. But not now.
